Not for everybody.
When we write that people use an encyclopedia that's not being completely
accurate.It's not that students and pupils aren't people (they almost always are)
but that on the whole only a very limited group of people (the aforementioned
students and pupils) seem to actually use them.
I may, of course, be wrong. I don't have statistics on this sort of thing, and hardly know where I might start gathering information. At a college I don't expect to find someone other than students or faculty using the encyclopedia (I doubt that I've ever seen faculty doing this, but then again, I only rarely see students doing so either) and I only very rarely get to a public library where there's a chance that I might see adults taking a volume off the shelf and leafing through it. I don't know how many people have encyclopedias in their homes (and don't get invited in to check) but it's my guess that families have these so that their children can use them for school work. Though I certainly don't object to their doing so, I find it hard to imagine that a parent would take a volume off the shelf in order to satisfy his or her own interest.
That being the case, it would seem that encyclopedias are the sort of thing that
it's great to have available on the shelf, but not necessarily to use. We like
knowing that they're there because the fact of their existence means that knowledge
has been organized, that there's an objective reality out there which adheres
to a certain order, that someone understands what's going on. And that in turn
brings us back to the question of whether a source like the Wikipedia is capable
of satisfying us in the same way that an authoritative encyclopedia can.
Go to: Going straight to the source, or
Go to: Too Common Knowledge.